


Duets

by the_actual_letter_n



Category: De Eneste To (Band)
Genre: "plot", Alternate Universe - High School, Gen, I have no excuse for this, M/M, Pining, Stupid dorks in love, Tsunderes, and some random people as plot requires, guest starring the rest of Nephew as Simon's exasperated band friends, i honestly don't know
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 08:31:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6975550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_actual_letter_n/pseuds/the_actual_letter_n
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was a punk, he wrote ballads, what more can I say. The high school AU nobody asked for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This is what hits you when you fall

In a school of this size, Simon Kvamm honestly thought he would have found more than four people interested in leading the life of a punk deity.

Not that those four people were bad - the members of his brand new and as of yet unnamed punk rock juggernaut were not only great musicians but also solid mates - it was just there wasn't quite enough of them. By some sort of miracle he had managed to get both a bassist and a drummer, but fact remained that most of his songs required both a rhythm and a solo guitar and as good as Kristian was, he only had two hands. Simon himself could have played some riffs on the side, but that not only distracted him from singing but also made it impossible to play his own synth in addition to the one manned by René. And synth was crucial to the image they were building for themselves. 

So they needed a second guitarist. Not desperately, but enough for Simon to bring the matter up on a rehearsal in one of the worse equipped but better soundproofed music rooms of their school.

'The problem is' he said at the end of his half-rant about the difficult nature of heavy music 'nobody else in this place can play.'

'I don't know,' Kasper shrugged, carefully coiling an amp cable. 'There's plenty of folks who play guitar.'

'Maybe, but not at our level.' Simon picked up the mic stand and moved it to the corner where it wasn't obvious that it had been knocked over at least three times within the time they've been there. 'We need someone who can keep up, not just strum a couple of chords.'

'I know a few of those too,' Kasper tapped his chin, collecting his thoughts. 'There's this girl in first G, but she doesn't like me, so that won't work. There's Adam in our class...'

'Who told us to go to hell,' Søren reminded from behind the drum kit.

'Yeah, still not sure what that was about. Hillesland is pretty good but she wants to sing too, Nilssen already has a band...' Kasper counted down on his fingers, then gave Simon a weighted look. 'And then there's Sommer.'

'Absolutely not.'

'He's good,' Kristian argued, but without much commitment. They'd had that argument before and it had never ended in anything constructive.

'I'll believe that when I hear it,' Simon replied, zipping his synth up in its case. 'He plays acoustic.'

'We all used to do.'

'Yeah, but we evolved, didn't we?' he gestured to his Epiphone, beat up and freshly missing a string, but still undoubtedly electric. 'We learned our basics and then found a sound that was mature and complete.' He ignored René's completely unconcealed eye roll. 'I doubt he's even heard of punk before.'

'If he was around when we did the improv last week then I have no doubt he has,' Kasper kicked the last extension under the table and picked up his case. 'I don't get why you have a problem with him.'

'I don't,' Simon scoffed and followed his friends out of the room into the half-lit, deserted hallway. Not many people stayed in school this late. 'Not with him personally. He's just a massive prep and probably the reason we got kicked out of the last music room.'

'That was mostly because we didn't go below twelve decibels gain,' René pointed out.

'But they did only tell us to play somewhere else after people complained,' Søren admitted. 'Which was bullshit. Nilssen's lot are just as loud and out of tune half the time but nobody tells them anything.'

Cursing the social injustice of the principal's ruling that any band classifying themselves as "rock and roll" must play in the soundproofed room at the far end of the school, they reached the parking lot where they had parked their bikes in the morning. They have missed the last bus hours ago - the early October darkness had long since set and there weren't many routes reaching the school anyway. They agreed to meet before class the next day and cycled off, each in his own direction.

The issue was, Simon really didn't know what his problem with Peter Sommer was. If put against a wall, he'd admit to a certain degree of envy - Sommer had managed to gather about the same number of admirers as Simon's band had and there was five of them and only one of him. So he had to be doing something right, even if Simon would rather strangle himself with his own strings than say it out loud.

However, he never really was the type to be envious of other people's skill. In his thinking, someone else being better at something didn't make him any less good - it just meant there's still even more to learn. Joanna from third G was unquestionably better than him at piano and yet seeing her didn't make his face flush with sudden irritation - and he would actually like Joanna in his band, if she was free. 

So what was it about Sommer that ticked him off so much? Was it his nicest-guy-in-school fashionable demeanor, that stood in such contrast to Simon's own nonconformist ways? Was it the fact that he attracted girls like a magnet, and lured away his potential fans? Was it the fact that he could actually pull off long hair and he didn't even need to look metal for his little acoustic ballads? Was it the ballads themselves?

That was the answer Simon settled on after he'd parked his bike in the back garden and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He was just angry that Sommer's simple four-chord melodies got as much recognition as his own songs, obviously more complex and thought out. He threw himself on the bed and reached for his old acoustic guitar, covered in stickers and at least a couple meters of electric tape. He strummed a simple chord progression in a slow, melancholic rhythm, staring at the posters on his walls and trying to imagine what sort of artistic place one has to be in to write dumb ballads about love.

\---

Peter Sommer considered himself a one-man band, but not in the way people thought he did. He wouldn't stroll into a studio and play anything they put in front of him, but he did believe that he could record a complete, coherent album all on his own. He only had his voice and his guitar, but he really didn't need anything else.

'I'm not saying I'm like a music god or something,' he said to the black-haired girl sat by his side at the bottom of the stairs in the main hall. 'I'm self-sufficient.'

'It's a good thing to be,' she winked at him. 'No reason you shouldn't give Anna a chance, though.'

Peter grimaced and looked down to his guitar, pretending to fiddle with its keys. Anna was a girl from his class who was apparently interested in singing a duet with him. He'd heard her perform before and she did have a good voice and was active in the theater group as well, so she always put a lot of heart into anything she sang, but... Well, Peter didn't really know her all that well. He had no idea if they'd work well together and that was crucial to him. He didn't like sharing his songs with just anyone.

'I guess,' he said to make the girl feel better. Her name was Sigrun and she was Anna's best friend and, apparently, manager. She had asked him about the duet three times over the last few days and her determination was honestly slightly impressive.

'She's a soloist too, you know,' she mentioned, leaning back onto the higher stair. 'Doesn't even like singing for theater that much, only time she enjoyed it was when they did that Les Mis song, that was a duet too. It's not like she's gonna want you in a band or something.'

'Hm,' Peter glanced up at her, but didn't elaborate. The fact that Anna only wanted a single performance did warm him up to the idea a little, but he was still hesitant about playing with an almost stranger. It wasn't that he didn't like her - he had no reason to - he just knew maybe two things about her and both were connected with schoolwork. That wasn't a basis for an artistic understanding, even a brief one, and he felt like he wouldn't be able to play with someone he didn't understand.

'Speaking of bands,' Sigurn said and pointed the glass door of the entrance with her chin.

Peter raised his head just in time to see five people in leather jackets, burdened with amps and cases and headed towards the far left hallway where the music rooms were hidden away from potential harm. Sigrun waved at the band as they passed and the dark-haired bassist nodded to Peter, but he just raised his eyebrows and pointedly looked back to his guitar, listening as their footsteps grew quieter and finally went silent. Only then did he cast an irritated glance after them and turn back to face Sigrun, who was staring at him incredulously.

'What was that about?' she asked, probably more amused than she should have been.

'I don't like them,' Peter explained.

'What, none of them?' she raised an eyebrow. 'Were you the one that complained about the noise?'

'Not to this extent.'

'Huh,' she rested her chin on her hand and looked down the hallway where the band had disappeared. 'Shame. I heard they're looking for an extra guitar, maybe you could jam with them.'

'As if,' Peter scoffed, but then he waved his hand and set his guitar to the side. 'Don't get me wrong, they're good at what they do,' he admitted. 'Most of them. It's just a shame their skill is being wasted on bad songwriting.'

'So it is true,' Sigrun gave him a sly grin. 'I heard you've got a bit of a grudge against Kvamm.'

'I don't have a grudge,' he corrected. 'I just think that when someone calls themselves a guitarist they should actually attempt to play their guitar, not just punch it in a vaguely rhythmical manner while screaming.'

'I think they've got a sound,' she opined, rising to her feet and picking up her backpack. 'You should get in touch with them, or at least with Anna. She is preparing a Christmas performance, you know.'

She waved at him and left, climbing the stairs towards the class where theater meetings were held. Anna would no doubt be there as well, awaiting a report from the last attempt at recruitment for collaboration.

Peter really didn't think he was holding a grudge - he didn't tend to do that and even less often towards people he didn't know that well. He simply didn't like Simon Kvamm and felt like he was pretty justified in it - he was the kind of person who seemed to want to be disliked, if only by virtue of his rebellious attitude. He did also call a lot of attention to himself, what with that random and very loud performance his band gave in the middle of the main hall at eight o'clock in the god damn morning; and it wasn't the good kind of attention either. Peter was convinced it was that stunt that got them banned from the nicer music rooms and honestly thought they kind of deserved it; as good as the rest of the guys were, Kvamm obviously had no idea how to compose a properly structured song. Peter thought about his music a lot and usually focused on the fact that it consisted almost entirely out of riffs and drum fills, because if he didn't he would have to acknowledge the lyrics, which didn't even commit to a single language and usually made little to no sense.

The problem was, Peter wasn't used to disliking people who didn't insult him personally. There was no doubt Kvamm got on his nerves - just seeing him between class was enough to shoot Peter's heart rate through the roof and leave him distracted for the rest of the day - but he couldn't really think of an actual reason for it. He did stand out of the crowd, with his earrings, and fitted leather jackets, and torn up jeans, and did seem to enjoy being looked at, which could be read as kind of arrogant. And his noisy songs did have an annoying earworm quality to them, which meant that whenever Peter had the misfortune of hearing them, he would end up remembering every single verse, which in turn meant that Kvamm's nonsense lyrics followed him around for much longer than he would like.

He sighed and picked up his guitar, packing it away into its case and then headed outside of the school to catch one of the last buses home. He still had a line from the horrid song Kvamm had played on his little impromptu concert stuck in his head and for the life of him he couldn't figure out what the hell it was supposed to mean. He boarded the bus and meandered between the standing students to a free seat towards the back. He sat down and rested his head against the window, wondering what sort of mental gymnastics one has to perform to justify writing something this meaningless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen I honestly have no explanation for this. S/o to my enabler heysommer, it's like 50% your fault.


	2. The direct path

The good thing about music lessons was that they didn't expect any commitment. Sure, there was a curriculum somewhere, probably, but when the general end goal was to "play better", there wasn't really that much structure the teaching itself could take on. That, combined with the teacher's admirable consideration of the students' own ideas of how they should be spending those couple of hours a week, meant that music class was considered something of a variable by those who decided to take it.

The problem with that, of course, was that whoever got to the teacher first pretty much got to dictate what the lesson would end up looking like. And the problem, in turn, with that was that some people who got to the teacher had agendas.

So when it was announced that this week the lessons would be focusing on musical teamwork by the way of forming duets, Peter knew he had been played.

Sigrun didn't even attend music class and yet he was convinced it was her doing that the room was now filled with the creaking of chairs being pulled to face one another and groups of friends arguing about the most optimal ways to split up. Peter didn't have that problem, only knowing a couple of people in the class - and also having had his pair pretty much picked out for him by the ways of fate. He sighed in resignation and meandered through the crowded room, guitar still in the case on his back, heading towards the place by the window which Anna usually occupied.

He was, however, stopped in his tracks when he noticed she wasn't alone. Apparently whatever desire she might have had to sing a duet with Peter came second to the prospect of spending time with a certain Solveig, who was now sitting on the floor and tuning her violin, very closely observed by Anna's nervous eyes. The girl hardly ever showed up to music lessons and it was no secret that Anna harboured a massive, badly concealed crush towards her, so it was quite obvious that Sigrun's plan was to take a different turn that day.

Seeing his chance, Peter turned on his heel and ducked behind the backs of a couple of girls, crossing the room towards one of the free chairs randomly strewn across it. He set his guitar down and reached to his backpack to pull out a large, worn-down notebook, which he then placed on the note stand, opening it on one of the few blank pages. He was fine playing his songs for an audience, but didn't like people read them - he felt like his words were too exposed when written in ink, too personal. When he played, he decided what his music was; on paper, it was up to the reader.

He finished setting up and scanned the slowly settling room. He was hoping to find someone who could maybe agree to pretend to play together when the teacher came along but otherwise do their own thing; it didn't seem like he would have any luck, though. The couple of people he knew in the class had already found their pairs, and those who were, like him, sitting alone waiting to be paired, were mostly strangers. There was Niklas who played the trumpet, Julia with her cello, a couple of guys whose names he didn't know, and, of course, Simon Kvamm, sitting in the furthest corner of the room with his arms crossed and legs propped up on a chair, chewing on a plectrum and demonstrating his general dissatisfaction with the world.

Peter turned away, feeling his face turning red, and focused on tuning his guitar. He had no idea what could have bothered him so much about Kvamm just being there. He knew they took the class together, even though he usually barely noticed him, hidden away in the corner. Maybe it was precisely that - the fact that Kvamm didn't even try to pretend he was paying attention to whatever was happening. 

Peter could bet he didn't even realize they were supposed to be looking for pairs.

\---

Simon was just starting to realize they were supposed to be looking for pairs.

He was the only member of the band actually taking music class, the other guys being busy with ridiculous things like history and math. Usually it didn't bother him, because the teacher rarely assigned them any actual tasks, so he treated it as just a normal hour of practice. This time, however, there seemed to be a commotion, as students were standing up and gathering into groups only to break apart again and sit in twos. Some of them were already tuning their instruments or playing scales in harmony with each other, which made it pretty obvious that the goal of the lesson was to play in a duet.

Simon was fine with that, mostly. He did prefer a full band if he wasn't playing alone, but he had no problem jamming just with someone else for a short time, as long as they didn't play the flute or something. He wasn't particularly bothered by who it would be either - Adam, the guy who told him to go to hell, didn't take the class, and apart from him, Simon didn't take that much notice of who was present in the room. So when the teacher walked among the crowd, asking who had been left without a pair, he raised his hand without much thought.

'Niklas, you can be with Ida,' the teacher decided, turning around to count the remaining hands in the air. 'Jan, Robert, you're already sitting together; Julia, I see you've paired up, that leaves...' She stopped and waved one hand towards Simon. 'You guys.'

Simon nodded absentmindedly and glanced across the room to where her other hand was pointing.

And then he froze in his seat, feeling a hot sensation climb its way up to his cheeks when he noticed waves of long, brown hair catching light as Peter Sommer turned to face him with an expression just as scandalized as Simon's own had to be.

\---

Motivated by the teacher's expectant stare, they slowly got out of their seats and walked towards the only relatively free space in the room, dragging their chairs behind them with a creak of metal on wood. Still observed closely, they sat back down, and the teacher did not turn away until they had picked up their guitars and faced vaguely towards each other.

Vaguely, because Simon couldn't bring himself to actually look at Peter. The sensation lingered and he felt like he could lash out at any moment, saying or doing something that would get him in trouble, what with the teacher being right there. So he fixed his eyes on his strings, feeling his face grimace in an attempt to conceal the burning redness. One hell of a wasted hour was this going to be.

Peter, on the other hand, shamelessly stared at Simon, taking in his features, made even sharper than usual by the angry frown, his ridiculous piercings, and his horribly beat up leather jacket, covered patches with names of bands he'd never heard of. Out of all the people in the room, he had to get not only the least competent musician but also the person who was the least likely to agree to whatever slacking off idea he could come up with. Amazing.

Simon glanced up, noticing Peter's icy blue eyes fixed right on him, and grimaced again. They couldn't just sit there in loaded silence for the entire hour. For one, the teacher would no doubt realize and yell at them and for two, Simon wasn't about to throw away a chance to practice, even if he was stuck with a partner who played acoustic.

For three, which he probably wouldn't admit to himself, he didn't like the idea of having to think about what exactly made it so hard for him to be in Peter's presence.

'So,' he cleared his throat and looked back down to his strings, tapping them lightly right above the bridge. 'Can you like... play anything?'

Peter leaned back in surprise, but quickly composed himself and raised an eyebrow.

'That's rich,' he mused, feeling irritation blooming in his chest again. 'I assumed you were only using that Epiphone to collect stickers.'

'Wha...' Simon's head shot up, but his voice hitched when he suddenly met Peter's gaze. He blinked, caught off guard by its intensity but then grimaced briefly and pointed to his guitar. 'This is an electric,' he said. 'I play songs on it. You know, the kind with more than two basic chords.'

'Great.' Peter rolled his eyes. 'Then can you take your electric and sit somewhere else so your electricity doesn't get in the way of my practicing?'

'We're in a pair, if you haven't noticed,' Simon pointed out, waving towards the teacher who still roaming the class and stopping every once in a while to listen. 'And she's gonna walk up to us any second now.'

'I'm not playing with you.'

'At least that we agree on.'

The fell into a heavy silence, each looking away, towards the floor. Peter couldn't stop himself glancing back, though, each time discovering a new outrageous detail of Simon's appearance. Making sure he wasn't about to apologize, Peter told himself. That was what those glances were.

Simon looked up as well, but he focused on something behind Peter's back, just as the sound of approaching footsteps broke through the cacophony of fifteen different songs being played at the same time. They both straightened their backs quickly, gripped their guitars tighter and tried to look very occupied with them.

'So, guys,' the teacher said, approaching them. 'Do you know what you're going to play?'

'Uh... No, not yet,' Peter replied, running a hand through his hair and fiddling with his tuner.

'We have very different tastes in music,' Simon added, a mocking tone making its way into his voice. Peter threw him an irritated look.

'Well, I know both of you write songs, maybe try something of your own?' the teacher offered.

'Yeah, sure,' Peter gave her a hopefully not too fake smile.

'Good idea,' Simon, to his surprise, played along. 'I've got a few new things, maybe we can try them out.'

The teacher nodded, satisfied, and walked off towards the other end of the class, where a couple of flautists seemed to be having a disagreement. As soon as she turned her back, Peter's smile dropped from his face, and Simon scoffed:

'As if you'd be able to keep up with my songs.'

'Oh yeah?' Peter felt his face flush again, this time with what he had absolutely no doubt was anger. 'What do you think I do with this instrument, admire it?'

'Honestly, yeah.'

'Really, that's rich coming from someone who played three different songs with same chord progression.' Peter watched in satisfaction as Simon's hands clenched into fists, but he wasn't done. 'That little concert in the hallway was the saddest thing I've ever heard, the only thing that saved you was the bass line. And I'm assuming Kasper wrote that.'

'Oh yeah?' It was Simon's turn to go bright red and this time he looked straight into Peter's face, his eyes filled with a whole new kind of insult. 'Then I can only assume you can do better, cause so far I've heard you talk but you don't do jack shit when it comes to actual music.'

Peter grinned and reached to the note stand, then tossed his notebook right at Simon's head.

'See for yourself. Don't say I didn't tell you so.'

He watched as Simon caught the notebook and, after throwing him a long, resentful look, flipped through the pages, scanning the lyrics and tabs scrawled across the checkered paper. Peter could feel his grin widening with every page - he knew that every single song written in there, even the ones he wasn't particularly proud of, could be enough to shut Simon's stupid mouth and prove to him that there was more to music than just slamming a fretboard.

Simon stopped at a random page, taken up mostly by a long melodic section written out on schematically drawn strings, with only a couple of lines of lyrics squeezed onto the margins. He looked over them quickly, but then he closed the notebook and handed it back to Peter with a mocking smile.

'I'll believe that when I hear it,' he said. From what he noticed, the melody didn't seem too complicated, but he'd only given it a quick skim - he didn't want to show or acknowledge the curiosity that sparked in him when he realized he was reading Peter's songs.

'You of little faith,' Peter smirked and once again brushed the hair out of his face before lining his fingers up on the fretboard into a chord. He stretched his right hand and started playing, remembering the melody as he went and improvising the parts he couldn't recall.

He had played maybe a couple of bars when he realized what he had just done. He had given his notebook of personal songs to Simon Kvamm. And allowed him to read it. And, as far as he could tell, did not feel uncomfortable with it.

He was angry, of course, because Kvamm pissed him off. But he wasn't angry that he had read the notebook; that had been Peter's own choice and he hadn't even thought twice about it. He'd been so focused on winning the argument, he hadn't realized that he had let Simon Kvamm, out of all people, experience his music in a way he had no control over.

A guitar chord, different from the ones he was playing, brought him out of his thoughts. He looked up from his strings and saw Simon's hand fluttering up and down in a careful tempo, the plectrum hitting the higher strings in a slow, delicate rhythm.

A rhythm that flowed like one with the melody Peter was playing.

Simon wasn't looking at him; he was facing sideways, towards his frets, but wasn't watching them either. His eyes were wandering somewhere around the ceiling as he counted notes and bars, trying to feel out the nature of the song. He clung very tightly to those numbers, because he honestly had no idea why he had started playing along with Peter's melody. He was ready to admit it sounded nice, in its simplicity, but that wasn't what had convinced him to listen to it so intently.

It wasn't the lyrics either, even though Peter had hummed them absentmindedly throughout the verse - Simon could barely make out any words. It was something about the performance; about the way Peter's smirk slowly softened into a content smile as he played, as if he had stopped caring about proving Simon wrong immediately after he'd started the song. As if the music was all that mattered all of a sudden.

And Simon was jealous of that. They were fighting, for crying out loud, was Sommer's actual attention too much to ask in a fight? He wanted to break through his bubble and bring him back to the discussion, remind him that there were reputations at stake here.

But now, as he strummed along with Peter's melody, the soft rhythm he'd made up on the spot seamlessly blending with the ringing staccatos, Simon felt his own irritation subside, slowly replaced with a strange, satisfying tingle somewhere in his lungs.

He blinked and turned to Peter, who was looking at him with an equally stunned expression, his fingers still dancing on the strings. He nodded and Simon found himself nodding back, counting down four, three, two, one, until both their guitars sang the same major chord which rang out the end of the song in the heavy air between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is as good a time as any to mention that my knowledge of music begins and ends at that one time I ACd on a jazz festival and saw some roadies setting up. Sorry if I wrote something that makes like an unusually small amount of sense.


End file.
